July 2008 Archives

So ‘The Sunday Times is The Sunday Papers’ is no more. After nearly two decades, my most famous one-liner sails off into the sunset. (I’m thinking a Caribbean sunset with Art Deco sun-rays – something spectacular.)

I already blogged here about it’s creation, so I won’t repeat that, but I do think it’s replacement as The Sunday Times’ strapline is a tad dull.

‘For all you are’.

It sounds like the title of a Gary Barlow song, but without the killer melody to follow.

It’s accompanied by a ham-fisted set of graphic icons to denote the paper’s many bits.

The new line is obviously to the same brief as TSTITSP, which is to push the Sunday Thunderer’s multi-section format and comprehensiveness.

Oh, a planner would say, it’s about YOU now though, we’ve redirected the sentiment at the consumer. For all YOU ARE. But it’s also really, really dull.

Volvo did ‘For all of your life’ years ago and least that carried the extra message of durability.

Great straplines are memorable sonic hand grenades: Hello Tosh, Gotta Toshiba.  Finger-lickin’ good. You’ve been Tango’d.

I remember the incredibly serious planner, Richard Huntington (who blogs here about counter intuitive thinking and planning in general, in a very intellektchual stylie), now at Saatchis, telling me years back on a GNER pitch in Chime that straplines were dead. He said they ought to be simple statements like ‘Go. The low cost airline from British Airways.’ Errr…the airline was great, the strapline perhaps not.

(I ignored him and won the pitch with ‘GNER. We love trains’, which given they’d just had the Hatfield crash shows that really genuine counter-intuitive thinking is not the preserve of spanners, sorry planners.)

There are fantastic planners and strategists around, but more and more I see ads based on byzantine towers of tortured and over-intellectualized strategic thinking, They’re so over-thought that any value or colour is washed out of the creative. The telecoms companies are some of the worst protagonists, particularly in the straplines that are supposedly the summation of the whole message:

Vodafone. How are you?  (Actually I’m really well but the coverage in my building could do with improving and I’m worried the Chelsea squad is too old.) What does that actually mean?

02 (cue man in a faux Yorkshire accent and bizarrely odd phrasing) See what you can do.

And finally, Orange. I am. (‘I am’ was also Earth Wind and Fire’s best studio album – Maurice White’s production was years ahead of its time. Serpentine Fire is a standout track but they’re all classics, check it out on iTunes). Actually the Orange ads that go with it do strike a chord, so we’ll let them off.

Bland, bland, bland. For all you are. And for the new ST commercial we’ll wheel out an ACT-OR to say some cosmic stuff I really can’t remember. Peter O’Toole is exhumed and rambles to camera but really does it have anything to do with the Sunday Murdoch?

I’m proud of my old line. It had bad grammar. It survived many changes of agency because Murdoch liked it. It was sticky and succinct and I wish I’d had royalties on it.

Farewell old friend, for all you were.